Read on if you are struggling with Windows 8 connectivity, here’s my story as to how I fixed mine.

I’ve been playing around with Windows 8 since its first public release. While I was getting used
to its schizophrenic (Metro and traditional desktop) interfaces, I noticed issues with my PC getting
‘Limited’ wireless connectivity. In addition to the limited connectivity issue, I started experiencing
recurring USB, Bluetooth, Outlook (svchost.exe) and other connectivity problems.

Recently, it got so bad that I had to start intentionally blue screening my PC to free up the corrupt
processes that were causing these issues to arise. Stopping and starting services, disabling and
enabling devices and other tricks were employed to have it maintain connectivity.

Soon after that, Microsoft acknowledged and put out a fix for the ‘Limited’ connectivity problem.
As soon as I could download it, I did. I noticed all my Bluetooth issues disappeared. To my chagrin,
my wireless issues got worse. Before the fix, I could connect to wireless networks 30% of the time.
Now it failed every time.

The svchost.exe process got worse and my PC became unusable until I went through my routine of disabling,
enabling the devices and processes. I’ve proceeded back to the Internet and the forums and started
going through these steps below.
1. Turned on "Download over metered connections"
2. Turned off all power management that I could find
3. Set maximum performance on wireless adapter in power settings
4. Ran through the network troubleshooter
5. WLAN Autoconfig is set to automatic
6. Verified that I have the latest drivers
7. I changed the driver from Microsoft to the manufacturer
8. Ran netsch winsock and netsch int ip
9. Disabled IP Helper
10. Disabled suspect applications in Task Manager’s Startup

In a stroke of luck, I read one article where a user uninstalled his corporate VPN client and it freed
up his PC. At this point, I had nothing else to lose. I uninstalled the VPN client I had on my PC,
rebooted and noticed that the wireless connected…automatically. I went to Device Manager and saw that
all the devices that failed to load, successfully loaded.

I was shocked.

I rebooted, put the PC in sleep mode, restarted and it worked every time! My PC feels like a brand new
computer now. Everything runs smoother and performs without a hitch.

Hopefully this article will help some other people experiencing the same problem. I was confident that
MS had fixed the WiFi issue and my problem was environmental. For the first time ever, I’m able to use
Win 8 as it was meant to be, an ultra-fast, ultra-responsive and rich OS that lives up to the billing.